Intuit (INTU) CEO Sasan Goodarzi has spent much of his life thinking about what it means to lose...
That mindset began when he was 9 years old. His family had to flee Iran ahead of the 1979 revolution.
Goodarzi told global news platform Semafor that this fear of losing has driven him ever since... pushing him to always ask whether he's doing the right things.
And that same vigilance is helping him protect his business...
The market has taken a wrecking ball to software stocks as AI anxiety spreads – including Intuit. It's down more than 30% this year as the latest wave of "SaaSpocalypse" fears takes hold.
Investors are acting as if generative AI will tear down the walls around small-business software in a matter of months. But they're being dramatic.
They're also missing what makes software businesses durable in the first place...
Sure, large language models ('LLMs') have improved at a stunning pace...
Alphabet's Gemini, Anthropic's Claude, and OpenAI's ChatGPT have each looked like the leader at different times.
Gemini is focused on handling different types of media, like text, images, audio, and video. Claude has developed a reputation for coding. ChatGPT remains a strong generalist that can ace all kinds of graduate-level tests.
Every few months, though, the leaderboard shifts. And that's exactly why the models themselves are becoming commodities.
When the underlying engines keep leapfrogging each other, the lasting advantage of using AI doesn't come from having access to one model over another.
It comes from the data you feed those models.
This is where Intuit separates itself...
The company serves about 100 million consumers, businesses, and accountants. Better yet, it sits on a huge reservoir of proprietary financial data across its services... like TurboTax, QuickBooks, Credit Karma, and Mailchimp.
Goodarzi argues this data is Intuit's competitive advantage, or "moat." And we agree...
Consider the nightmare scenario investors are spinning up. They're assuming an AI model can spit out a viable rival to TurboTax or QuickBooks in a weekend.
In theory, sure... a model can generate code quickly. But in practice, even an exact replica of something like TurboTax is far less useful without the data to make it work.
The big AI models are trained on publicly available information. But millions of households use TurboTax to file taxes. Businesses across the country rely on it to run payroll or invoicing.
It's not so easy for an LLM to recreate that system.
Goodarzi saw the AI shift coming well before ChatGPT became a household name...
In his Semafor interview, he said he pushed Intuit to bet on a mix of data, AI, and human intelligence years ago.
And that has helped the company become the dominant player in its field... even if the market doesn't believe it will last.
We can see this through our Embedded Expectations Analysis ("EEA") framework.
The EEA starts by looking at a company's current stock price. From there, we can calculate what the market expects from the company's future cash flows. We then compare that with our own cash-flow projections.
In short, it tells us how well a company has to perform in the future to be worth what the market is paying for it today.
Intuit's Uniform return on assets ("ROA") has risen for years... climbing from 21% in 2015 to nearly 60% over the past four years. That's five times the corporate average.
But the recent sell-off has investors scaring themselves. They're treating Intuit as though returns will drop back to roughly 45%...
The market is assuming AI will hurt Intuit's edge. But the company's proprietary data looks even stronger in an AI-driven world.
AI may end up reinforcing the advantages that made Intuit dominant in the first place.
Intuit isn't some run-of-the-mill software company...
Tax filing is a high-stakes process. Many folks have filed through TurboTax for years.
That will make it easier for them to use the software in the future... something even the best AI duplicate can't replicate.
Plus, Intuit's mountains of data help make its products "stickier." Business customers have a hard time switching to a competitor.
The market is treating AI as if it were a demolition ball for all software. But you shouldn't treat these companies the same across the board. Intuit's data-driven advantage helps set it apart from the pack.
Regards,
Joel Litman
March 12, 2026
P.S. In all my time working on Wall Street – and throughout my financial career since then – I believe I've found the one strategy that unlocks the key to everything else...
My team and I analyzed more than 3,000 stocks and more than 40,000 data points to figure this out. It's directly related to advantages like Intuit's.
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